From The Diplomat to Jury Duty, Should You Add These To Your Watchlist?
From a diplomat thrust into the spotlight to a regular guy thrown onto a fake jury duty case… Let’s talk about the new movies and shows out this month.
Carmen
Carmen is an iconic opera that has been adapted multiple times — from 2001’s Carmen: A Hip Hopera with THE Beyoncé to this new imagining with Melissa Barrera and Paul Mescal — but is it worth the watch?
Both Barrera and Mescal have had huge breakouts over the last few years so I was excited to see what they brought with this film. While there are some really stunning musical moments with Barrera’s solo song and a dance between the duo, it’s super weak on plot. This makes the chemistry between the two leads feel lackluster. Unfortunately it felt fake deep as the director focused so much on visuals, but delivered no story or character development.
Carmen is playing in theaters in New York and Los Angeles.
Jury Duty
Jury Duty is so wholesome and fun as it follows regular guy Ronald Gladden who thinks he’s participating in a documentary about jury duty. The reality? The whole case is fake and everyone but him is an actor — including James Marsden playing a fictionalized version of himself. Over the course of the season, Ronald gets put into progressively wackier situations that he handles with humor and ease, becoming a sort of everyday hero, while the cast becomes a found family. Think The Office meets The Truman Show.
The first season of Jury Duty is streaming on Amazon’s Freevee.
Renfield
Reinfield is a bloody good time! Literally, there’s so much blood.
It’s very gory, stylized, over the top, and campy… to the point that we even see Renfield tear off a henchman’s arms and use ‘em like nunchucks. It was hilarious! They’re also tackling multiple genres with this supernatural cop-crime boss-vampire drama centered on the toxic relationship between Renfield and Dracula. Nicholas Hoult is a great lead in this, I liked Awkwafina playing a role we haven’t really seen her in… and Nicolas Cage was perfectly cast, I just wish there was even more of him.
Reinfield is playing in theaters.
Single Drunk Female Season 2
If you’re not watching Single Drunk Female… what are you waiting for? The show follows Samantha Fink (Sofia Black-D’Elia), a young women forced to move back home and sober up after a spectacularly embarrassing public breakdown. When you think of an alcoholic, you think of like an older guy… so it’s really refreshing to see young people getting sober and figuring their lives out. There’s heart and humor as we see the ups and downs this ensemble deals with. They really become a family of sorts that you love to follow over the course of these two seasons. This season in particular has some great cameos from Busy Philipps to Molly Ringwald to Bob the Drag Queen.
New episodes of Single Drunk Female season 2 air Wednesdays on Freeform, with the full season available on Hulu.
The Diplomat
Keri Russell stars as Kate Wyler, a career diplomat who is thrust into a new high-profile gig as an ambassador amid an international crisis, in The Diplomat. We follow her journey juggling this new path in the spotlight and her turbulent marriage to a political star.
As someone who is new to political thrillers, I loved this cast and it was exciting to follow so many women in the political space, but I found the jargon to be very overwhelming at times. There are times when they don’t go deep enough with the story. There is a lot of back and forth and they tell us more than show us what is going on. It’s a slow burn of a show that ends fairly abruptly. While I’d be curious to see what happens in a second season, I hope they take the story to the next level.
Season one of The Diplomat is streaming on Netflix.
